


Awaiting serendipity

by Singittome



Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types, The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Canon Compliant, Cranks, Dark, Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Original Character Death(s), The Scorch Trials Spoilers, crank reader
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-31
Updated: 2016-08-31
Packaged: 2018-08-12 05:59:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7923250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Singittome/pseuds/Singittome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You wonder how long till you're on your knees, clenching forcefully to the hem of Newt's shirt, begging for a bullet through your brain for one in return.<br/>Now that you think of it, he might not be the worst possible company for dying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Awaiting serendipity

On the day a boy named Newt died, tears were cried.  
On the day a boy named Newt died, dreams were dreamt.

o'o'o

Let me tell you a story – it begins with you, hanging by a thread above an endless ocean of sand radiating with warmth and fire it absorbs from the desert sun while lightnings crackle and break against the jet black sky, as if thrown by some angry deity determined to cut the thread as soon as possible.  
It begins with a boy who had a dream in which he could fly, and a city in the distance like a toy that was once loved and treasured, but with time it had grown shabby and now it lays tossed away into the farthest corner of the room with spiders dancing waltz around it.  
It ends roughly four weeks later, with the ravaged carcass of the said boy sprawled in your arms as you whisper, quietly, promises you can't fulfill against his bloody lips.  
It ends with assistant-director stoically reading a long list of artifical names, knocking down the metaphorical tower of toothsticks that you've buildt together, leaving you to pick them up one by one and him, one hundred and three meters away, buried in a pile of them and confused.

o'o'o 

This world is a prime example for deception – shiny billboards that transmit encouraging words and breathtaking, green neon lights, polished windows reflecting hopes and hydrants accumulating dreams.  
You're very, very lost.  
This sign once read WELCOME TO DENVER! but the diodes behind some letters had escaped to find a place to die.  
COME DENVER! it says. Come join the others. Come join New York, London and Tokyo.  
Burn, Denver.  
Burn out. 

o'o'o

Long before you came to Denver to help a certain friend complete a certain task, you spent two hundred and twenty-two days in a wonderful place called Hell.  
Hell is nothing like you had imagined – the very quiver that word sends through your limbs reeks of ember and forest fires, and ash stocking within your lungs until there's too much and, in a way, you drown.  
No such luck.

o'o'o

You arrived to Hell in a box. You were a gift to the place, a porcelain angel to lighten up the ambient.  
Theseus cheated his way out of the labyrinth but you had no Ariadne to give you the end of a golden string.  
You couldn't dream. Hell was a maze, with walls of stone overgrown in wet, shy moss that hid in gaps and cracks, the walls towered above you and shielded you from the only thing that's left on the bottom of Pandora's box.  
Two hundred and twenty days passed, until The End came in form of a scared, scarred girl who triggered the tragedy.  
You were sick from all the alliteration.

o'o'o

Did I mention you have no memories?  
You're a lifeless, empty shell.  
The first thing you recall is the damp stench of the meadow in Hell.

o'o'o

Thomas and Teresa walked you out of Hell straight into Tartarus.

o'o'o

The Scorch is where the story begins .  
You're tossed out of WICKED's beak only to be grabbed by its talons. A game of cat and mouse, played from the beginning of the known universe (bang!) to end in the exact moment when the said universe collapses (poof!) creating borders between me and you, lies out of love and lies out of fear, the maze and the scorch, life and death.  
There's a boy named Newt back in the end of your army of misfits, too painfully slow to catch up with the gossip of salvation.  
You know why he's too slow?  
He had a dream once.  
He had a dream that there's no line between Hell and Tartarus, and he decided that he'd rather not wake up at all, ever.  
So he decided to fly.  
Only that he couldn't.

o'o'o

Consider that the prologue. Chapter one begins where there are lightnings sparkling between earth and sky and also between the fingertips of you and the boy named Newt as you forcefully drag him towards the city of spiders to escape sparks that break out wildly, setting dry debris that covers the ground on fire.  
Newt suffers the permanent consequences of not being able to fly.

o'o'o

And so you enter the city in the corner last, intertwinned arms and shoulders and cries muffled under heavy pants of people who run a lot but in a way, they do an awful lot of falling.  
Cranks are very welcoming.  
Right after they decide not to execute your leader, after all, you sit amongst them down on the dirty ground next to a fire that's everything but inviting, reminding you of the wildfires that licked the places where lightnings had killed.  
Hints of flames reflect in Newt's eyes, coloring the irises in a hue of honey. Without the mirror images of colors, his eyes are plain colorless, as if someone had turned off the gas lamps behind his pale pupils. Click. Click.

o'o'o

The difference between two weeks and a heartbeat has been unappealingly small lately.  
In a heartbeat, you're in the Safe Haven, and it isn't there. There's just a small flag marking it as THE END of your journey, hinting the passage to Hades.  
Thomas and Teresa are reunited with you, but you can't bring yourself to care. Somewhere along the path you've lost the ability to let go of the tips of Newt's pale long fingers, and all you do while waiting is brush your own, tanned, dirty ones ever slightly against them.

o'o'o  
Monsters come and are defeated.  
The berg comes down and everyone first crawls into white coffins and then rushes towards the small doors to the escape pod, but you just stand, not really hearing, in the middle of the field. Lightnings hit the ground and static electricity raises your hair and it floats around your head like a ghastly halo.  
Then they pull you in.

o'o'o

You sit in the WICKED's hq and you lay around some more. Hades has freshly painted walls and white sweaters that smell of security, but under all that you can smell putrid lies.

o'o'o 

Assistant director stoically reads a long list of artifical names, knocking down the metaphorical tower of toothsticks that you and Newt buildt together, leaving you to pick them up one by one and him, one hundred and three meters away, buried in a pile of them and confused.  
You should've known that, whatever this is, it wasn't buildt for you.  
Neither of you are immune.

o'o'o

When you head towards Denver with Thomas, Minho and Newt, towards the whispering lies of an untouched piece of civilized society that hadn't been taken away yet, you rush forward with painful craving to see one last bit of serenity before you die.  
You've already noticed the lines the Flare has begun to rip inside both you and Newt, how each day you're a bit more undone and how each evening you dream a little more dreams. 

o'o'o

You wonder how long till you're on your knees, clenching forcefully to the hem of Newt's shirt, begging for a bullet through your brain for one in return.  
Now that you think of it, he might not be the worst possible company for dying.

o'o'o

When you're taken to the Crank palace, you leave quietly with nothing but a note on the inside of the berg door, to become two green leaves in the sea of brown, already dried ones.

o'o'o

Dreams of the maze come back to you at night, lurking in the dark hallways of your sickness-troubled mind.  
You dream of grief and grief serum and grievers, of sun flares, sunlight and artifical suns, of coming together and falling apart and of lightnings above the desert, of yourself afraid of growing old and cold and how it made you senseless.  
They aren't real dreams, rather night time reveries, backflashes behind your eyes that grow more and more sunken and your cheekbones that are, just like Newt's, so sharp that you might cut your fingertips on them. You stroke the side of his face anyway, and feel him growing paler beneath your touch.  
There's something seriously wrong in the air tonight and you'd rather not be here to witness it.  
All that's left is the moist smell of ozone, the stale stench of corpses, sleeping with eyes wide open and getting high on Bliss, awaiting serendipity.  
You wake up one day, and he's gone.

o'o'o

When you hear that Newt has left with some more or less Gone Cranks to dance while Rome (or rather, Denver) is burning out, your slow, dying brain is somewhat unable to process the thought.  
Why is it then that you can still feel the phantom touch of fingertips on your palms? The aroma of desert fire mixing subtly with the awfully sweet stench of sickness? The sting of pain as he injects time into your veins?  
That night, you have your first real dream.

o'o'o

It ends with the ravaged carcass of a boy sprawled in your arms as you whisper, quietly, the promisses you can't fulfill against his bloody lips.  
The lights of Denver palaces, death of a city, screams of young-no-more cranks and shadows of fantasies in dark, purple bags under his eyes as life leaves them quietly, soundlessly, also taking with them a piece of your sanity.  
When you wake up, long time ago, and yet next day you find out that he's dead.

o'o'o

On the marble floor you lay, far from the shadow of Tartarus and the wildfires of the maze, close enough to kiss a griever yet alive enough not to try.  
The pale grayish blue of the ceiling is inviting, and from here, it looks almost as if you can touch the sky without really raising your broken fingers.  
A meek hint of a smile spills on the crackled line of your pale lips.

o'o'o

What happened to Thomas, pray tell, and to Minho and Teresa?  
Only one thought, a postcard to WICKED forms in your head, a last handful of words against the blank bakground:

o'o'o

They no longer own you.


End file.
